Dutch firm Optics11 in talks with navies on secretive underwater listening tech

PARIS — Dutch startup Optics11 is in talks with dozens of navies about using its optical-fiber sensing technology for underwater monitoring and threat detection, with between five and ten navies already signed on as clients, Chief Executive Officer Paul Heiden said. The company will have around 35 paid trials this year with navies testing its tech, Heiden told Defense News at the Euronaval maritime-defense exhibition outside Paris on Nov. 4. Those tests include several for the German Navy through various local defense-prime partners, as well as for Sweden, the United Kingdom, Belgium and France. Optics11 beams light through optic fiber to detect acoustic vibrations underwater, either for static monitoring or towed array sensors, and Heiden said the technology is more sensitive and has higher resolution than passive sonar using piezoelectric detection. The firm is developing a towed array for the Royal Netherlands Navy for the future Orka-class submarines ordered from France’s Naval Group. “Every navy knows that this is the technology of the future,” Heiden said. The Optics11 portfolio includes OptiBarrier, a stationary seabed monitoring system, and OptiArray, a towed array that can be deployed from submarines and unmanned vessels. Optics11 CEO Paul Heiden presents one of the company’s fiber-optic seabed monitoring systems on display at Euronaval near Paris on Nov. 4, 2026. (Rudy Ruitenberg/staff) The CEO said Optics11 will probably raise funds next year, and do so at a unicorn valuation, referring to a startup valuation that exceeds US$1 billion. The startup raised around €100 million in funding in the past 15 months, through equity financing as well as €25 million in venture debt financing from the European Investment Bank, according to Heiden. Optics11 is not yet profitable, and Heiden expects the company to become cash-flow positive in 2028. The CEO said nearly everything around underwater data collection is “extremely secret” and a lot of information around navies using Optics11 technology is classified. He said the company’s products are currently deployed in war zones, “and yeah, I can’t say anything about that either.” Optics11 has a technology lead in optical-fiber sensing after years of deep-tech research that would make it hard for a competitor to enter the market with anything similar, at least in markets including Europe, the Middle East and South East Asia, according to the CEO. He said he’s not sure where China or the United States stand in terms of developing similar technology. The optical fiber technology used by Optics11 was initially used in medical applications, and is so sensitive it can detect cells dividing, according to Heiden. For underwater use, the company’s fiber-optic sensing can detect an oil tanker at 100 kilometers, the CEO said. Most of the company’s “really crucial developments” of the past seven to eight years rely on trade secrets rather than patents to protect intellectual property, due to the sensitivity of the technology, Heiden said. The Dutch government provides specialists to help the firm protect its data, and vets company employees working on classified technology. “You can’t publish this, you can’t patent it, so it all has to be kept secret, and we’re getting great help from the Dutch government to keep it truly secret,” Heiden said. Heiden said he holds monthly discussions within the company to make sure employees disclose if, for example, they are being threatened or their families are being put under pressure. The Optics11 strategy is to build and sell its products locally, both to reduce supply chain risk for customers and because governments want to see their defense investments flow back into their own economies. “We’ll identify who the local prime is, and then we’ll work with them to fully integrate our technology,” Heiden said. Should Optics11 raise money next year, the funds would partly be used to finance its expansion in the Middle East and South East Asia, where the firm is opening offices and hiring staff with “the goal to operate in a highly localized manner.” Optics11 already works with partners including Saab, Rheinmetall, Fincantieri, Thales and Exail, Heiden said. The firm is a technology supplier for Ocean Infinity, which was picked by the U.K. to manage the anti-submarine surveillance program as part of Britain’s Atlantic Bastion initiative. The higher sensitivity of optical fiber compared to traditional sonar translates into a “much larger” amount of sensing data per cubic nautical mile, which Optics11 processes using its own edge-computing software, the CEO said. “Initially I thought we could work with a partner, but our data density is so high that we couldn’t derive any value from third-party sonar processing software,” Heiden said. “That’s why we started building that kind of software ourselves, and it’s now an integral part of our offering. So we’ve really built a serious R&D operation here.” Artificial intelligence has helped cut down the effort required to develop software, with Optics11 now employing ten developers, according to Heiden, who said that as recently as 2024 and 2025 he had still been planning for around 60 to 80 people in software development. “That means you can invest that money in acoustic specialists who have a much better understanding of how sound travels through the ocean, which will allow you to optimize your algorithms much faster and make them more precise for sandy seabeds, rocky seabeds, that sort of thing,” the CEO said. Optics11 has been working with the Royal Netherlands Navy for at least eight years, with the Dutch military providing millions of euros in subsidies, steering the direction of development, as well as testing the company’s technology on submarines, according to Heiden. Attracting funding was still complicated for Optics11 in early 2024 due to financial firms excluding defense firms from investment portfolios, something which “completely changed” in November that same year after a vessel dragged its anchor in the Baltic Sea, severing several cables, Heiden said. “All of a sudden all kinds of investment firms were willing to work with us,” Heiden said. “That was really driven by our ability to listen underwater, companies were prepared to seriously invest in that. So seriously, in fact, that over the last fifteen months we’ve raised about 100 million, which is quite a substantial amount.”